“Idle fancy and historical imagination”

Gospel Scholar Vincent Taylor once wrote, “It goes without saying that in any recreation of the past much has to be supplied by the imagination; but there is all the difference in the world between idle fancy and the historical imagination controlled by facts which have been patiently investigated.”++

The SpendaYearwithJesus story is the result of a decade of patient investigation.

If the details of the Gospel accounts are to be accounted for on first-century terms (and in light of pre-Pentecost realities), then economic, geographical, and relational implications may be played out in narrative form. SpendaYearwithJesus is exactly this sort of play–one which emerges out of the broader historical realities implied by the available details.

++ Vincent Tayler, The Formation of the Gospel Tradition (London: MacMillan, 1933), 168.